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Shel Israel just announced that we have raised
$100,000 to fund the development of our book, “Age of Context.”
If you haven’t heard that we’re working on a book, we are, it’s
going to focus on how companies are able to build highly
anticipatory services (think of Google Now) and highly
personalized services (ToyTalk, for instance, is building toys
that will interact differently with you depending on who you are
and where you are) because of these five things:

Sensors that are exponentially increasing. You are carrying
seven sensors in your smartphone. But soon we’ll have a lot
more.

Wearable devices. Google Glass, Oakley AirWave, Plantronics,
Smith I/O Recon, FitBit, Basis, Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up, and
more are coming nearly every week. (In the photo above that I
shot on Saturday in Sun Valley, Idaho you can see famous
photographer Chase Jarvis wearing the Smith I/O Recon ski goggles that have
sensors and a display).

Database innovation. Big data, database computation,
cloud-based databases, and more are bringing new capabilities to
developers.

Rapidly increasing social data. Twitter is about to have a
billion-tweet day. That number is continuing to double every year
or so.

Over the past year we’ve seen this “contextual service” trend
just get more and more important. To get the book done I needed
help, which is why I am working with Shel Israel, Forbes author,
again. But he needed to quit his consulting business to write the
book quickly (we’re going to try to turn this book around very
quickly, expecting to get it on the market by October, 2013).
Also, we wanted to self publish the book, in order to be more
agile (most book publishers just can’t turn around a book fast
enough, nor do they like letting authors publish content for free
ahead of the book). So, we’re using Guy Kawasaki’s methodology for
publishing, which he calls APE (Author, Publisher,
Entrepreneur).

In addition to getting Shel paid, the funds will be used to edit,
design, and market the book.

Here’s the sponsors, thank you to each one of them:

Rackspace, the
open cloud company. They served as our lead sponsor and they
have been the most generous contributor so far.

EasilyDo
is the first context aware pro-active assistant mobile app. It
is sort of the GoogleNow of iPhone apps, except it actually
lets you do stuff in the app, like track a package or add a
contact.

Betaworks is
a data-driven media company based in New York that builds and
invests in the social web.

Microsoft
Bing is one of the world’s leading search engines, helping
millions of consumers do, not just search.

MindSmack, an interactive agency that designs
and develops for mobile, web and TV.

Some things:

Being a sponsor doesn’t influence what we write in the book.
We are going to tell it like we see it and cover competitors of
these well.

We still need more funds to properly promote the book.
Usually book publishers give you an advance, then take you on
speaking tours and arrange PR through radio, TV, and newspapers.
We’re going to fund that ourselves. Write me if you would like to
be involved: scobleizer@gmail.com

The $100,000 raised so far is about three times what we would
have been able to raise through traditional publisher and has a
bigger upside because we can be much more agile and innovative
(getting the book on market quicker after being done, for
instance, or publishing all of our own work on our blogs).

Here’s some of our latest interviews (these are in addition to
the dozens of interviews we’ve posted previously):